1 Oh boy, a new LMB novel!  I haven't been reading much fiction in the last few years but I'll get this novel.  Amazon also paired it up with a new Patricia Wrede novel, apparently a sequel to "Sorcery and Cecilia", also very tempting.

1 I recognize him! He was the bad guy in 24, I believe Season 3.

1 I laughed. I cried. I laughed again !

Sniff, Sniff. Shortsighted networks and their crazy ratings demands.

1 Usually in this kind of situation the tape has bad blocks.

2 The system was playing up a bit last week, so I took the hint and made a second backup.

3 Actually ... in this kind of situation, usually the tape controller adapter has gone stupid.

Everything looks fine ... until you actually need to restore data ...

4 Which is why I made the second backup to another server, using rsync.

1

Yep, thinking you can relax and have a holiday completely throws off your system, and it responds by turning on you.  Every time.

Feel better soon!

2

We have colds like that here in our hemisphere, too. I just got over a bad one earlier this month, as a matter of fact. I've just gotten over stage three -- in which you cough up all sorts of nasty stuff at odd times, unexpectedly. It's much better than the first two stages, though!

Hope you get over all of this as soon as possible -- if not sooner!

I've found that straight scotch helps the sore throat when you are out of tea and honey . . . ;->

3

It's been said that of all the things that won't help a cold, Bourbon Whiskey is the best. But I doubt they sell much Bourbon in Strilia, and I doubt you like it. So perhaps some local equivalent will do in a pinch.

4

Yay Pixy's alive.

I'll share a family seekrit with you for cold / sore throat relief. We'll mix the tea and honey, which works pretty good as you know, but also add in a bit lemon juice and a bit of bourbon (for it's medicinal purposes of course). I'm not sure why the combination works so well, but for some reason it's better than the off the shelf stuff.

Feel better soon.

Surely they sell Wild Turkey, Jim Beam or Jack Daniels bourbon in Australia. I mean life would cease to exist without Kentucky Bourbon Cake or Chocolate Bourbon Cake. Really it would.

5 I can independently confirm through comprehensive surveys of bars and clubs in most of Australia that bourbon is available to us.

Scuse me while I go lie down.

6

RFNA you say? That's terrible, but I feel as though I gulped down a spot of N₂O₄ with a N₂H₃CH₃ chaser.

Get well soon!

 

7

OK this is probably too late to do any good, but a gram of Vitamin C every couple hours has been scientifically shown to reduce symptoms.

Colds

At least 29 controlled clinical trials (many double-blind and placebo-controlled) involving a total of over 11,000 participants have been conducted. These trials were reviewed in the 1990s^[5][6] and again recently.[16] The trials show that vitamin C reduces the duration and severity of colds but not the frequency. The data indicate that there is a normal dose-response relationship. Vitamin C is more effective the higher the dose. The vast majority of the trials were limited to doses below 1 g/day. As doses rise, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep the trials double blind because of the obvious gastro-intestinal side effects. So, the most effective trials at doses between 2 and 10 g/day are met with skepticism. Reports from physicians have provided ample clinical confirmation.[17]

The controlled trials and clinical experience prove that vitamin C in doses ranging from 0.1 to 2.0 g/day have a relatively small effect. The duration of colds was reduced by 7% for adults and 15% for children. The studies provide ample justification for businesses to encourage their employees to take 1 to 2 g/day during the cold season to improve workplace productivity and reduce sick days. The clinical reports provide the strongest possible evidence that vitamin C at higher doses is significantly more effective. However, the effectiveness typically comes at the price of gastro-intestinal side effects. It is easy for physicians to minimize these side effects since they cause no lasting harm. Adult patients, however, have proven reluctant to subject themselves to gas and cramping to deliver an unknown benefit (the duration and severity of colds is highly variable so the patient never knows what he/she is warding off). It is well worth the effort of identifying the small subset of individuals who can benefit from high daily doses (>10 g/day) of vitamin C without side effects and training them to regularly take 5 g/day during cold season and to increase the dose at the onset of a cold.

The trials proved that vitamin C is more effective for children. Reports from the field confirm the observations in the trials and suggest that children are less prone to vitamin C side effects.[18] Colds and flu are a serious problem for children. Every time a cold infects a child, its growing mind and body must divert energy from its usual business of growth and development. If the cold is followed by an opportunistic infection, such as bronchitis or ear infection, more energy must be diverted. Colds are the number one trigger for asthma.[19] Pre-school children in daycare are nearly constantly fighting infections (5-10 per year).[20] Chronic disease in childhood is believed to sometimes have permanent developmental consequences which can contribute to decreased life expectancy.[21]

Also, the sicker you feel, the more C your body can probably utilize.

1 Are all of these Italian spams coming from the same porn business?

Maybe you could do the Blue Frog thing and just auto-magically fill their sign up cgi with plausible looking garbage every time they spam you?

2 .. hang in there, big guy..... remember, you are The Man....

3 I am Teh Pixy!

1 Oops.

There were comments here, but I zapped them.

2 I've updated the spam filter now.  Let's see how that works.

1

Um... I hate to bug you, Pixy, but The Pond seems to have disappeared (it's been missing for at least four hours).  I've tried to go to http://wonderduck.mu.nu and just get a blank window.  I've checked it on three different computers, too, so it's not just Chiyo-chan.

Help?

2 Fixered. 

3 A Hero Is You!

4 Pixy, I also hate to bug you, but I have the same problem as Wonderduck. Texasbestgrok's been whited out for more than 12 hours now. Help! (And Thanks!)

5 Doh! Just saw your comment on munuviana.mu.nu; should have started there. I rebuilt my site and it reappeared. Thanks for everything you do for MuNu.

6 Welcome back! A spammed MuNu is better than no MuNu at all.

7 I'm on holidays at the moment, with intermittent internet access, and that only when I'm not being upchucked on by my infant nephew.  (Darn it, I liked that shirt!)

I'm going to look for some Sugar and Galaxy Angel DVDs today. :)

8 Do you think the spam-bots are looking for the words "hollidays" or "time off" in blogs?

A bunch of comment spam started slamming in the day Pixy announced a temp absence.

9 How do you say "spam" in Italian? (or "Bugger off, you spammy wankers"?)

10

Free memory yawns

Pixy scolds naughty server

Spam uber alles.

 

11 I'm back!

Now I just need to catch up on a week of lost sleep.  [It took me three tries to type the word "sleep", just to give you an idea of my present level of function.]

12

Pixy's home!!!

Vacation's over.

Welcome back to real world.

Live badger down shorts.

1 Who was it? Sounds like the kind of thing that bad-mannered spiders do.

2 No identification.  One from a LayeredTech server, one from a ThePlanet server, one from the Netherlands.  Not from any of the usual spiders.

3 Use robots.txt on a page to post it as off limits to robots. Hide links to it from mere users via javascript trickery.

Ban every IP that visits it.

1 There's also a remake of Kanon.

2 Which, at least through one episode, is quite impressive.  Much, much detail... and a distinct feeling that the cast and crew really like the characters and story.

3 The Negi remake seems to have increased the diversity in character designs, at least. At first glance some of them are sufficiently different from the manga that I don't recognize them, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. -j

4

Sometimes there's a good reason for a remake. In the case of Kanon, the new version is going to be twice as long. I have read that the first version seems rushed, because there really wasn't enough time to tell the whole story from the manga, and to give each of the girls her due.

The currently-ongoing "Ah! My Goddess" remake is certainly justified. And my understanding was that the original version of "Hanaukyo Maid Team" was pretty crummy, but I liked the remake.

So this isn't exactly unprecedented. But it's a bit strange for it to happen so rapidly.

5 The general consensus on the first Negima anime was that it mangled the original manga (of which I read six volumes before realizing that it wasn't my thing at all) in addition to having horrible animation for the first nine or so episodes. The latter was so bad that the creator made his disappointment publicly known, resulting in said episodes being fixed for the DVD release (the second was actually reanimated in its entirety). SDB's first impressions were spot-on in noting the paucity of fanservice in the TV series, especially compared to the manga. As probably the most-reviled big-name adaptation in the last two years, Negima! was due for a remake... though from what I hear the new series is even less faithful to the original work, using the original characters and setting to tell a new story.

Kanon is somewhat different... the 2002 version by Toei Animation, while by most accounts rushed and having mediocre character designs, isn't nearly as hated as the Negima! anime. In fact, it's got a pretty sizable fanbase despite its failure to live up to the original work, which is considered a classic of its medium (not a manga, but an adults-only visual novel game). I can say with certainty that there would be no Kanon remake today were it not for the 2005 TV anime adaptation of AIR, another visual novel from Key, the makers of Kanon. AIR TV was very well-received among fans of the game and otaku in general, and some executive figured they'd go crazy for an adaptation of Kanon by the same studio that animated AIR (Kyoto Animation). So far, they have.

Kyoto Animation's stock is pretty high these days, what with them having done AIR, Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid, and that show you may have heard of with the girl who believes in aliens, time travelers, and espers, so a lot of fans (myself included) have high hopes for the remake. Judging from episode one, we won't be disappointed.

6 An error occurred: Fruitcake error: Can't create a new thread (errno 12); if you are not out of available memory, you can consult the manual for a possible OS-dependent bug

7 Yeah, I just saw that too.  Not quite sure what was going on, but I've restarted MySQL and it's all happy now.

I think MySQL ran out of connections.  Why that happened isn't clear.

8

Quick work, Pixy!  You just let me post the Wonderduck Award for Greatest AMV of ALL TIME by performing your magic...

9

Pixy,

What in the great pits of hell is going on with the fansubbed .avi file for Sasami Club (I assume we're both talkiong about the file linked from Animesuki)? I haven't found a combination of player and codec yet that can get the video working.

10 A few people posted about that at AnimeSuki and elsewhere.  I use the Community Codec Pack
and Core Media Player and don't have any problems.

11

While I haven't d/l'd Sasami, I've had great luck with VLC Media Player.  I haven't made the thing cough-and-die yet, no matter what format I've thrown at it, and it's a standalone player to boot (no codec packs!).

CCCP is supposed to be really good, if you can figure out how to install it (I've got the instructions... I think they're even in English, but I'm not positive).

12 I kind of like Core Media Player, but it does randomly drop dead on occasion.  (Actually, it usually tells you it's dropped dead, but keeps right on playing.  The controls even work.  It's the most lifelike zombie I've ever seen.)

CCCP has the usual install wizard.  Just double-click and follow the bouncing ball.  But if VLC is working for you, I wouldn't bother.

13

I'm somewhat familiar with VLC player. My dad upgraded his old Dell laptop from 98 to XP, and apparently the exact combination of that model, and that upgrade, causes Windows Media to drop dead when you try to watch a DVD movie (which was a large part of why he got the laptop in the first place). VLC player was the only thing rumored to fix the bug.

I've experimented with Zoom player as well, but even it's been choking on things lately.

It's rediculous having to chase run down codecs constantly because some schmuck decides to encode his video in a format that's 15 minutes old.

14

CCCP has the usual install wizard.

WHERE?  The only thing I've seen is Insurgent and the CCCP codec pack!  I'd love to have the .mkv/h264/whateveritscalledthisweek on my system... then I could have a halfway decent chance to burn these newer shows to DVD.

15

Well I used the Core/Commie combo and it seems to work now.

Duck, just go the Pixy's link and download the executable. I got a strange daisy chain error about inaccessible memory when it tried to run, but I just shut it off in the task manager and the procees went smoothly from there.